The President’s Shell Game

This past Friday, President Obama announced what he called a “compromise” in his plans to forbid those Christians who recognize the moral problems surrounding contraception and abortion from putting those beliefs into practice. This new plan, he claims, is no longer a blatant assault on religious liberty for the sake of advancing his policies. Unfortunately, this is simply untrue.

The president told us:

Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive services -– no matter where they work. So that core principle remains. But if a woman’s employer is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company -– not the hospital, not the charity -– will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge, without co-pays and without hassles.

The result will be that religious organizations won’t have to pay for these services, and no religious institution will have to provide these services directly.

Make no mistake. This is simply a shell game. There is no requirement that pharmaceutical companies provide contraceptives to insurance companies free of charge. No, the insurance companies will still be paying out money for their policy holders’ contraception. Where will the insurance company be getting this money? From the premiums paid by those policy holders–the very same Christian organizations who do not want to be participants in contraception and chemical abortion. These organizations simply no longer have any choice in the matter–just like under the plan that wasn’t falsely labelled a compromise.

This still takes away religious liberty; the only difference is that liberty is now replaced by plausible deniability. “Who is paying for the abortifacients and contraception? We don’t know (wink wink).” President Obama is allowing Christians to save face by appearing to adhere to their beliefs in public–he is nevertheless taking away their freedom to actually adhere to those beliefs.

Only time will tell whether this con job be enough to silence the opposition and allow the president to force his morality on the American people.